Paul Graham Dropping Serious Wisdom

Every so often Paul Graham will email me something and say “can you read this before I post it?”. He did that last week. It was a talk he was going to deliver in Sam Altman‘s startup class. It was great. I told him I wouldn’t change a thing. I am not sure if he changed it before he delivered it, but what I do know is he posted it yesterday. And here it is.

I just went back to my emails with him and pulled these quotes out for all of you. These are some nuggets that I particularly liked.

On Investors – “our function is to tell founders things they will ignore”

On Selecting Investors, Co-Founders, Etc – “If you’re thinking about getting involved with someone– as a cofounder, an employee, an investor, or an acquirer– and you have misgivings about them, trust your gut. If someone seems slippery, or bogus, or a jerk, don’t ignore it.”

On Knowing About Business Before Doing A Startup – “The way to succeed in a startup is not to be an expert on startups, but to be an expert on your users.”

On Success – “Y Combinator has now funded several companies that can be called big successes, and in every single case the founders say the same thing. It never gets any easier. The nature of the problems change. You’re worrying about construction delays at your London office instead of the broken air conditioner in your studio apartment. But the total volume of worry never decreases; if anything it increases.”

On Finding The Next Big Thing – “If you think of technology as something that’s spreading like a sort of fractal stain, almost every point on the edge represents an interesting problem.”

Those are the quotes I called out in my emails back to Paul. They all resonate hugely with me. But the whole post is great. Give it a read.